Gothic alphabet

This article is about the 4th century alphabet of the Gothic Bible. For manuscript hands and typefaces sometimes referred to as "Gothic script", see Blackletter. For type fonts sometimes referred to as "Gothic", see Sans-serif.

The alphabet is essentially an uncial form of the Greek alphabet, with a few additional letters to account for Gothic phonology: LatinF and G, a questionably Runic letter to distinguish the /w/ glide from vocalic /u/, and the letter ƕair to express the Gothic labiovelar.

Contents

Origin

Ulfilas is thought to have consciously chosen to avoid the use of the older Runic alphabet for this purpose, as it was heavily connected with heathen beliefs and customs.[2] Also, the Greek-based script probably helped to integrate the Gothic nation into the dominant Greco-Roman culture around the Black Sea.[3]

Letters

Below is a table of the Gothic alphabet.[4] Two letters used in its transliteration are not used in current English: thorn þ (representing /θ/), and hwair ƕ (representing /hʷ/).

As with the Greek alphabet, Gothic letters were also assigned numerical values. When used as numerals, letters were written either between two dots (•𐌹𐌱• = 12) or with an overline (𐌹𐌱 = 12). Two letters, 𐍁 (90) and 𐍊 (900), have no phonetic value.

The letter names are recorded in a 9th-century manuscript of Alcuin (Codex Vindobonensis 795). Most of them seem to be Gothic forms of names also appearing in the rune poems. The names are given in their attested forms followed by the reconstructed Gothic forms and their meanings.[5]

Most of the letters have been taken over directly from the Greek alphabet, though a few have been created or modified from Latin and possibly (more controversially[7]) Runic letters to express unique phonological features of Gothic. These are:

𐌵 (q; derived either from a form of Greek stigma/digamma (),[7] or from a cursive variant of kappa (ϰ), which could strongly resemble a u,[7] or by inverting Greek pi (𐍀) /p/, perhaps due to similarity in the Gothic names: pairþa versus qairþa[citation needed])

𐌸 (þ; derived either from Greek phi (Φ) /f/ or psi (Ψ) /ps/ with phonetic reassignment; possibly the letterform was switched with 𐍈)[7]

𐍉 (o; derived either from Greek Ω or from Runic ᛟ,[9] or from a cursive form of Greek Ο, as such a form was more common for omicron than for omega in this time period, and as the sound values of omicron and omega had already merged by this time[7])

𐍂 (r), 𐍃 (s) and 𐍆 (f) appear to be derived from their Latin equivalents rather than from the Greek, although the equivalent Runic letters (ᚱ, ᛋ and ᚠ), assumed to have been part of the Gothic futhark, possibly played some role in this choice.[10] However, Snædal notes that “Wulfila’s knowledge of runes was questionable to say the least”, as the extreme paucity of inscriptions attests that knowledge and use of runes was rare among the East Germanic peoples.[7] No indisputably Gothic Runic inscriptions are known to exist.[7] Some variants of 𐍃 (s) are shaped like a sigma and more obviously derive from the Greek Σ.[7]

Unicode

The Gothic alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in March, 2001 with the release of version 3.1.

The Unicode block for Gothic is U+10330–U+1034F in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane. As older software that uses UCS-2 (the predecessor of UTF-16) assumes that all Unicode codepoints can be expressed as 16 bit numbers (U+FFFF or lower, the Basic Multilingual Plane), problems may be encountered using the Gothic alphabet Unicode range and others outside of the Basic Multilingual Plane.

Notes

^For a discussion of the Gothic alphabet see also Fausto Cercignani, The Elaboration of the Gothic Alphabet and Orthography, in “Indogermanische Forschungen”, 93, 1988, pp. 168-185.

^The forms which are not attested in the Gothic corpus are marked with an asterisk. For a detailed discussion of the reconstructed forms, cf. Kirchhoff (1854). For a survey of the relevant literature, cf. Zacher (1855).

^Zacher arrives at *iuya, *iwja or *ius, cognate to ON ȳr, OE īw, ēow, OHG īwa "yew tree", though he admits having no ready explanation for the form ezec. Cf. Zacher (1855:10-13).